BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Reviewed by Stephanie M. Hilger
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“[T]ropicalization is a reworking of colonialist discourse through
revisions by postcolonial agents or tropicopolitans; the deployment
of newer reading formations toward the middle of the eighteenth century
and after; and the continued retroactive creation of postcolonial genealogies,
including my own, that further deform the phenomena, in the manner of
a Freudian Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action” (Aravamudan
15). With this concise definition Srinivas Aravamudan outlines
his argument and sets the tone for his analysis of colonialism and agency
from 1688 to 1804. In a superbly argued book, the author casts
a refreshing new look at eighteenth-century literature through a postcolonial
lens, while navigating a delicate course for his “postcolonial eighteenth
century [that] may go beyond the pale for some dix-huitièmistes
and remain insufficiently transgressive for some postcolonialists” (330).
The author’s style is at times difficult and complex, yet it goes hand
in hand with the defamiliarizing reading practice that Aravamudan advocates
for the analysis of eighteenth-century “tropicopolitan” texts.

The author bases his argument on his version of the concepts of “contact
zone” and “transculturation” put forth by Mary Louise Pratt in her Imperial
Eyes (1992), a study of travel writing from the eighteenth century
to the present. In a manner similar to Pratt, Aravamudan investigates
the dynamics of the colonial space where various cultures meet.
He appropriates the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit,
here construed as the uncontrollable and unpredictable “retroactive
power” (279) that various elements wield in the creation and reception
of a text, to analyze the ambivalent cultural products of that space.
By looking at familiar texts in unfamiliar ways and by highlighting
their “ideological slipperiness” (91) and “parodic undercurrent” (98),
Aravamudan unsettles the canon of eighteenth-century literature and
questions established reading formations. The author combines
close textual analysis with postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis to
demonstrate the ambivalence of eighteenth-century texts which “interrupt
the monologue of nationalist literary history” (12).

Tropicopolitans is divided into three parts. Each part
frames its discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture with
a critical concept that Aravamudan proposes: “virtualization,” “levantinization”
and “nationalization.” The first part, “Virtualization,” consists
of three chapters and discusses Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The
Royal Slave (1688) and Thomas Southerne’s dramatic adaptation of
it (1695), Daniel Defoe’s The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the
Famous Captain Singleton (1720), and Joseph Addison’s play Cato
(1713). The second part explores practices of “levantinization”
in two chapters, one on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s travel letters based
on her journey to the Ottoman Empire (1763), and the other on Edmund
Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful (1757, 1759) and his Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790). Finally, the third section
defines and illustrates “nationalization” in an analysis of The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
Written By Himself (1789) and the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas
Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique du commerce et des établissements
des Eurropéens dans les deux Indes (1770-1780).

The first part, “Virtualization,” inquires into “colonialist representations
that acquire malleability because of a certain loss of detail” (17).
For example, Aravamudan posits Oroonoko as a text that transforms
into literary language the discourse of contemporary paintings which
equates pets with Africans and exhibits them as exotic possessions.
This reading frees Behn’s piece from conventional idealizations of Oroonoko
or Imoinda as incorporations of postcolonial agency. Instead of
focusing on the African royal couple, Aravamudan shifts the focus to
the narrator’s ambiguous process of self-fashioning. He argues
that “the narrator is making a retroactive bid to refashion herself
as an erstwhile erotic accessory of the king with the help of Caesar
[Oroonoko] as prop” (46), a claim which provides the reader with a new
lens to analyze the relation between colonizer and colonized.
In the second part, Aravamudan posits the same destabilizing move in
his definition of “levantinization” as “a creative response to orientalisms
as a plural rather than singular category” (19). Instead of labeling
her an orientalist or a feminist, he explores the hybrid “levantinizing”
moments that occur when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s subject positions
of feminist and orientalist intersect. Montagu’s discovery of
smallpox inoculation in Turkey is one of those moments where the female
traveler can be seen vacillating between admiration of this foreign
practice and a need for “symbolic inoculation against the temptation
of an elsewhere” (185). The third part discusses “nationalization”
as “a more generalized form of tropicalization, indeed that of the ‘empire
writes back’ variety” which “resembles anti-imperialist political practice
most effectively” (21). Here Aravamudan explores, for example,
the complicated agency of an Olaudah Equiano who, as an African slave,
learns to write back in his master’s language. Aravamudan claims
that his reading is different from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s, which, in
his opinion, “pays the price of reiterating the evolutionary narrative
so dear to early abolitionists, that of humanizing the African” (270).
Aravamudan shifts his attention to Equiano’s “self-consciousness around
scenes of reading” (271), which leads to a broadening of the discussion
to “the book as colonial fetish” (271) and the consequences of print
capitalism.

This inquiry into “the paradox of finding agency in the dead
matter of books” (282) extends beyond an analysis of eighteenth-century
writing. Tropicopolitans investigates the paradoxes of
“Eng. Lit.” (273), whose nationalizing tendencies excluded non-British
texts before the explosion of postcolonial studies in the nineties.
Aravamudan urges a critical reading of the eventual inclusion of these
texts into mainstream “Eng. Lit.,” or other national canons, for that
matter: “A postcolonial eighteenth century becomes disciplinarily relevant
and critically meaningful if we shift our focus from texts to the reading
formations through which those texts are perceived and institutionalized”
(329). At this point, the author’s observations about the development
of print capitalism in the eighteenth century come full circle as he
reflects on its global version in the early twenty-first century.
Aravamudan argues that “literary studies cannot stop with the teaching
that the world is textualized” (269), but instead should “dislodge texts
from familiar reading formations” (330). Taking into account questions
of metaliteracy and deploying a Brechtian sense of Verfremdung
when teaching and writing about (eighteenth-century) texts can ensure
that “scholarship contends with its social mission alongside its professional
self-justification” (330). Aravamudan’s “disciplinary activism”
(330) consists in his exhortation to “act locally along with the injunction
to think globally, conduct eccentric readings as well as mount bureaucratic
arguments that inscribe the margin into the center” (330). And
here, of course, Aravamudan voices a reality which is all too familiar
to his readers teaching and publishing in the twenty-first-century academic
system.